The most miserable training camp week in memory ended yesterday for the Rangers, whose 4-2 Garden defeat to the Devils sent them to Europe last night with a 1-5 preseason record against NHL clubs.

The record, though, is the least of it. The fact is that Brandon Dubinsky, Ryan Callahan and Paul Mara are the only three Rangers to have had impressive camps. The fact is that one week before the season-opening pair in Prague against the Lightning, Tom Renney is waffling about line and defense-pairing combinations.

The fact is that whoever it is in the hierarchy who decided that it was more important for the team to jam in three home dates – three home gates that is – than spend time on the practice rink developing cohesion before this journey, did the Rangers no favor.

Because after five games in the past six days and six games in eight days beginning last Saturday – two goals in each one of them – the Rangers are nowhere. No line has developed chemistry. No defense pairing has looked good. And none of the players still competing for spots on the third or fourth lines deserves a uniform more than Petr Nedved, who was dismissed from the squad on Friday.

It turns out Nedved wasn’t competing against Blair Betts or Laurie Korpikoski – or anyone else – as much as he was competing against Renney’s loyalty to Betts and resistance to the concept of No. 93 wearing the Blueshirt. A shame.

After practicing as units for the first time on Friday, both the Markus Naslund-Scott Gomez-Chris Drury and Nigel Dawes-Brandon Dubinsky-Nikolai Zherdev moved the puck well against the Devils, even if both combinations suffered defensive breakdowns.

That shouldn’t have been a surprise, given their sum of 45 minutes of practice ice time together, but that’s what Renney harped on after the match. Indeed, the head coach even suggested that he might be forced to revise his plan to open the season with those triumvirates before admitting that was a, “knee-jerk reaction.”

How then to categorize Renney’s straight-faced assertion that he has, “liked [Wade Redden’s] game?” Maybe it’s simply Redden, a veteran, attempting to prepare for the season on his own timetable, but no Rangers played more poorly in the exhibition matches than Redden.

Meanwhile, the presumptive third-pair of Mara and Dimitri Kalinin never once practiced or played together. Even yesterday, while Dan Girardi sat for “body maintenance,” Renney broke up the Marc Staal-Michal Rozsival pair, playing Staal with Mara, Rozsival with Redden, and Kalinin with Corey Potter.

Now, this worthless week that ended with this worthless game – the Rangers were bullied by the Devils, something that never happened with Sean Avery in the lineup – sends the team to Bern. That’s where they will try to get ready for the season by playing two exhibition games on the larger international ice surface against European clubs, all the while trying to be ambassadors for the NHL.